Medal of Honor would not be the first video game to put you in the mind of a terrorist

Recently, Atomic Games DICE and EA announced that in the forthcoming installment of their successful Medal of Honor series, players will be able to play as the Taliban in multiplayer matches. Yes, that Taliban.

On
the one hand, for obvious reasons, it's a design decision that might
make some people uncomfortable. But on the other hand, if handled right,
it could be a somewhat profound look at our current international
political climate, or a look inside the mind of a terrorist and what
causes them to resort to such acts. The game won't be released until
October so it's difficult to say for sure, but from the sound of it, the
"play as the Taliban" mode appears to be mostly superficial. And, for
their part, the game's makers are playing the "it's only a game" card, something we've covered before.

The mealymouthed "it's only a game" defense is disappointing. What I haven't heard many people point out, though, is that this Medal of Honor
game would not be the first that enabled you to play as a member of a
terrorist organization. Really, when you think about it, any number of
games involve a protagonist either a) invading a foreign territory,
committing acts of violence, destroying property, and generally
instilling fear in the citizenry or b) defending his or her homeland
from an unwelcome occupying force. But even moreso than that, one game
tackled the issue of capital-T terrorism almost fifteen years ago - and
though it may have resolved itself a bit easily, it still presented
nuanced background motivations for the characters involved. The game was
pretty popular, too, and most people seemed to regard it well at the
time.

Yep, Final Fantasy VII. I've actually never been 100% clear on this (despite multiple playthroughs of the game), but the entire world of FFVII,
is ruled by the Shin-ra, which as best I could tell was some kind of
hybrid of a tyrannical governing body and a monopolistic power company.
Your party for almost the entire game includes three members, Tifa and
Barret along with their new recruit Cloud, of an organization (called
AVALANCHE) who specialize in bombing facilities called Mako reactors,
which provide energy to various cities by drawing from the planet's
natural Mako resources. AVALANCHE's contention was that these reactors
were killing the planet, and they felt it was their duty to destroy them
to protect the planet. Okay, not quite the same thing as the Islamic
fundamentalists of the Taliban, but still - a group responsible for the
deaths of innocents all the same. And the game doesn't sugarcoat that
fact.

The
game actually opens with a mission to destroy a Mako reactor: you take
control of Cloud, a mentally damaged ex-millitary man (those who've
played the game know that you learn a lot about Cloud and his history
throughout the game, but we're not really focusing on the
Jenova/Sephiroth stuff for purposes of this discussion) who's helping
AVALANCHE out on this mission, although he hasn't decided how loyal to
the organization he wants to be at this point. You set the bomb, and
make your getaway. You then reconvene in a hideout underneath a bar in
the slums, all to do something similar again the next day.

A
bit later on, you start to understand the scope of what you've done. In
a disproportionate response, the Shin-ra destroys an entire sector of
the underground slums of Midgar - specifically, the one AVALANCHE is
based out of. As this is happening, one of the members of the group says
"Because of our actions, many people died. This is probably our
punishment." In other words, she's accepting her fate as the retribution
for the collateral damage caused by the group's bombings. Shortly
afterwards, guilt begins to consume Barret, the ringleader of the group,
who begins using stronger and stronger language to rationalize his own
actions.

As
with practically everyone else in the game, we do come to learn more
about Barret as we go. Specifically, we find out that before his days in
Midgar, he lived in the mining town of Corel, where he lobbied his
fellow townsfolk to accept the Shin-ra's plan to build a reactor there.
Unfortunately, after the reactor was built, an accident there inspired
the Shin-ra to destroy the entire town of Corel, killing Barret's wife,
knocking Barret's friend Dyne off of a cliff, and leaving him with
Dyne's now orphaned daughter Marlene. AVALANCHE, we come to learn (after
encountering and killing the now-insane Dyne), was actually the vehicle
for Barret to seek revenge. We also discover that Tifa joined the cause
of AVALANCHE for similar reasons: she held the Shin-ra responsible for
the death of her father.

So there are political, moral and personal
reasons for their actions - but those actions also came with a cost.
They re-commit themselves to the cause for the actual future of the
planet - as I said, it's a bit of a tidy resolution - but for a while,
there was some real moral ambiguity there. Now, apparently, the makers
of Medal of Honor are unwilling to go even that far.